There is Power in a Union

by Philip Dray

  To Reuther the practical tool-and-die man, this was all just common sense. If, in the interest of winning the war, the way industry functioned had to be suspended or changed, so be it. But the prospect remained distasteful to company heads. What if the CIO attempted to adapt the plan to other essential wartime industries, such as copper mining? And how could executives be sure such realignments of authority would disappear when peace returned? In the end, the devastation of Pearl Harbor stunned even the most hardened war skeptics into action; the conversion of the auto and other industries to the production of wartime matèriel did occur, although not with the unique labor-industry-government coalition Reuther had envisioned.54

  Following the passing of Philip Murray and William Green, Reuther’s counterpart at the AFL was newly elected president George Meany, an official at the New York City Plumbers Union who had come up within AFL leadership ranks. Intimidating to look at—he was commonly described as “a cross between a bulldog and a bull”—Meany was a dominating character, one of the few labor leaders brazen enough to scold John L. Lewis for balking at the anti-Communist oath required by Taft-Hartley. Reuther and Meany were markedly different personalities, but they shared the experience of representing the first generation of American labor leaders who were union professionals, that is, men who spent far more time at union headquarters or with government officials and corporate leaders than mixing with their own rank and file. Although with his signature stogie clamped in his teeth Meany looked like a rabble-rouser, he had expensive tastes in food and travel and liked to brag he had never walked a picket line; Reuther had more the manner of a well-heeled businessman than someone who’d ever worked in an automobile factory, let alone one in Russia. “If anyone can bring about a merger, Reuther is the man,” the AFL’s Green had once said. “We can get along with him better than anybody else in the CIO.” This was partly due to Reuther’s anti-Communism, which made him one of the few CIO upper echelon types palatable to the super-patriotic Meany.55

  The cautious first steps toward AFL-CIO reunification began in 1953 with a “no raiding” agreement aimed at reducing conflict between rival AFL and CIO unions; a Joint Unity Committee was then established, working in secret to perfect the terms of the merger, which took place formally in February 1955. The new AFL-CIO, it was agreed, would focus on membership growth and the suppression of union-related corruption and Communist infiltration. The spirit of cooperation was nowhere better illustrated than in Reuther’s offer to forfeit the top job in the combined organization. Meany would be president of the AFL-CIO, with Reuther serving as vice president in charge of industrial unions.56

  The press and public’s comfortable acceptance of the joined AFL-CIO was itself a measure of the extent to which unions, by the 1950s, had come to be seen as conservative features of American life—securing decent wages and working conditions and supporting the decade’s high standard of living. It was in fact in 1956, the year following the merger, that the peak of labor union membership in the United States was attained, with 17.5 million people in unions, representing 33.4 percent of the non-farm workforce.57

  It was at this very juncture, however, that organized labor began to suffer a bit from its own success. Many large employers had by now embraced the welfare capitalist philosophy that valued worker retention and a satisfied, productive workforce; most offered competitive pay and benefits, regular hours with compensated overtime, paid vacations, sick days, and other perks. With such nurturing from employers and a strong economy at their backs, workers began to identify increasingly with their place of work or regard themselves as independent entities in little need of employee solidarity. In a consumer society where workers could afford their own homes, two cars, and household appliances, and look forward to sending their children to college, the old fighting spirit of American unionism—that of Homestead, Lawrence, Toledo, or Flint—was becoming something of a relic.

  This curious “accomplishment” resulted from more than simply the rising tide of living standards and the flood of affordable consumer goods. Blue-collar workers in mining, transportation, and heavy industry, long the bulk of unionized workers, were declining in number, while the number of white-collar workers in service positions, retail, and municipal and federal government jobs continued to grow. As new technology displaced industrial workers, new “soft jobs” were created—in insurance, real estate, financial services. Although some service-industry jobs, such as retail sales, did come to be unionized, they had nowhere near the clout or energy of the major craft and industrial unions of yore—the miners, railway men, and steelworkers.

  Mobility was also a factor: unionism generally was associated with industrial jobs fixed by location—a steel center like Pittsburgh or the automobile-making nexus of Flint and Detroit. But most white-collar positions came with the promise of possible transfer to new cities or branch offices, movement that paralleled the increased transience of American life generally. The Sunbelting of America—made possible by the advent of air-conditioning and the building of the interstate highway system—opened whole areas of the country for relocation, such as Houston, Atlanta, Phoenix, and Southern California. Automobiles carried workers away to new opportunities in faraway states, or took them home at night from the plant or the office to their own backyard patios in the suburbs. With workers commuting to their jobs each day by car, a workforce no longer needed to reside within the shadow of the mill or plant, nor did men congregate in union halls or gather over beers each night to swap workplace grievances; increasingly they perceived their lives and their aspirations as things separate from their means of earning a paycheck. They no longer saw themselves as rooted in one occupation or at one plant, nor did they accept that they might devote years of labor to a particular employer.

  Finally, while common wisdom held that the merger of the AFL and CIO would create a more powerful, dynamic super-union, the irony was that union membership had hit its historic high during the 1950s partly because of the intense organizing competition between the AFL and the CIO. With the merger, fewer resources and man-hours were expended to lengthen the membership rolls, and the determined “passion for growth” within the groups gently began to recede.58

  HOUNDED FOR DECADES by aspersions of radicalism, many U.S. labor organizations had developed by the postwar years what amounted to almost a fright mechanism about anything that resembled or reeked of Communist influence, an anxiety reflected in society generally. But in what would become one of organized labor’s least admirable endeavors the AFL, and later the CIO and the combined AFL-CIO, motivated by anti-Communism, embarked in the late 1940s on a protracted misadventure of covert intervention in the affairs of foreign labor groups, ultimately acting in concert with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to undermine left-leaning unions abroad.

  This interference was rationalized as necessary to protect the democracy and high standard of living of American workers against potential encroachments of the Communist system. Given the liberal resentment of conservatives’ success at painting U.S. labor as “radical,” however, there was something disturbing about a policy that saw American labor foster the conservative suppression of foreign workers’ organizations.

  In spring 1945, just before the Second World War ended, hundreds of trade union representatives from the Allied nations had met in London to discuss ways to coordinate the postwar revitalization of European, British, and Soviet trade unions. At a follow-up convention in October representatives from fifty-six nations founded the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU). Sidney Hillman, one of the leaders of the American delegation, had been strongly influenced by a speech Vice President Henry Wallace gave in 1942 titled “The Century of the Common Man,” in which Wallace called for a “global New Deal” that would raise standards of living, end colonial regimes, rebuild infrastructure, and promote free trade. Having been active during the war funneling aid to Progressive labor unions in Europe and China, Hillman agreed with Wallace that the emerging postwar corporate e
conomy would require a globally connected labor movement. Walter Reuther also thought the effort to cooperate with British and Russian trade unions meritorious, and shortly after the WFTU’s founding the CIO began lobbying for the WFTU to receive delegate status at the United Nations.

  The AFL, however, refused to participate in the effort, feeling the WFTU embraced too many unions that were under Communist influence. George Meany insisted that real trade unions were impossible under the Soviet system. Speaking at one of the early postwar international labor forums, Meany called the Russian organizations “pseudo trade unions … instruments of the state … official branches of the government and of its ruling dictatorial political party,” remarks that were perceived by many in attendance as undiplomatic.59 But the U.S. State Department sided with Meany and the AFL, while Labor Secretary Perkins, who discussed the matter with Hillman, came away concluding that the former Roosevelt confidant was too trusting of the Soviets. Washington urged the AFL to create an alternative international labor body, the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), and eventually the CIO and many European unions also abandoned the WFTU.60

  The AFL’s leadership in foreign affairs dated at least from 1910, when Samuel Gompers sought to limit the entry of immigrants he suspected might be used as strikebreakers. He subsequently aligned the AFL with Woodrow Wilson’s decision to enter the First World War, and was among the U.S. labor officials selected by Wilson to confer with their British and European counterparts after the armistice. Gompers encouraged European labor organizations to resist Bolshevism and Socialism and to emulate America’s democratic trade union tradition. He was one of the founders of the International Labor Organization (ILO), affiliated with the League of Nations, which united representatives of labor, industry, and government to stand up against communistic union activity in Europe; one of his Italian contacts was an apostate Socialist named Benito Mussolini.61

  By the time of the Second World War the AFL had its own International Affairs Department, headed by Jay Lovestone, a former American Communist who had been exiled from the party in 1929 and had in turn become rabid in his contempt for the Soviet Union. “A shrewd, brilliant Jew with an overwhelming ambition to be one of the big shots,” one contemporary called him.62 Lovestone, who had arrived in America as a Polish immigrant in 1907 and was raised on the Lower East Side, had attained the position of general secretary of the CPUSA in the 1920s before being repudiated by Stalin at a congress in Moscow for his “deviationist” views. Back in New York Lovestone joined the ILGWU’s David Dubinsky in chasing followers of Stalin out of the garment unions, and Lovestone carried out similar expulsions for the UAW. Meany, along with Dubinsky, who was dismissive of his garment industry cohort Sidney Hillman’s dovish outlook toward the Soviets, in 1944 tapped Lovestone to lead the Free Trade Union Committee (FTUC), a covert program to destabilize leftist labor movements in postwar Europe. FTUC was funded by a grant of $35,000 per year from the AFL, with Matthew Woll of the Photo Engravers as chairman, Dubinsky as treasurer, and Meany serving as liaison between FTUC and the main AFL leadership. FTUC’s public face was that of publisher of the Free Trade Union News, which in various languages was circulated worldwide, but its actual operations were secret and known to only the few principals.63

  Meany’s and Dubinsky’s fears of Communist infringement on European labor were not entirely unrealistic: there was good reason to assume that Continental trade unions, still smarting from their unhappy experience with free enterprise and Fascism in the 1930s, would naturally drift leftward, and that this inclination would be encouraged and co-opted by the Soviets. Indeed, within a year of the war’s end, it was apparent that Russian “social engineers” were active in Germany, if not elsewhere in Europe, trying to win favorable public opinion for eastern occupiers, while the Western nations were making no comparable effort.64 The Russians had lost little time in creating puppet governments in the small nations of Eastern Europe. In January 1946 they took over Poland, in May 1947 Hungary came under Soviet domination, and in February 1948 Communist-led labor unions aided in a pro-Soviet coup in Czechoslovakia. The Soviets also expedited their development of an atomic bomb, which they detonated successfully in a test in 1948.

  As a former Communist, Lovestone knew better than anyone that the party considered labor unions a vital stepping-stone to political authority, and he assumed that the Russians would employ all manner of subterfuge in order to secure that access in Europe. The West would have to fight hard, matching if not surpassing Soviet determination. “Lovestone had an utterly Manichean view of the world,” recalls Victor Reuther.65 Living alone in Manhattan, working out of a modest office in the Garment District, Lovestone maintained an extensive network of contacts throughout Europe and North Africa, wrote much of the Free Trade Union News, and gained the confidence of numerous diplomats and foreign ministers with his insider’s grasp of leftist labor activities on the world stage. Whether providing raw intelligence to union heads or ghostwriting articles for Dubinsky, Meany, and others that ran in U.S. newspapers and magazines, Lovestone transformed selected American labor leaders into fierce Cold Warriors.

  In France, Lovestone’s trusted agent was Irving Brown, who had established a beachhead in Paris in November 1945. While Brown covered Europe, FTUC representative Richard Deverall ran operations first in India and later in Japan. Harry Goldberg organized Indonesia. Willard Etter financed the Free China Labor League from Formosa. All answered to Lovestone. Brown crafted a model for AFL involvement in Europe by conspiring against the democratically elected Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), an AFL-like but Communist-influenced workers’ federation with 5.4 million members. Using laundered funds from the United States to stir dissent about Communist influence within CGT’s leadership ranks, Brown splintered defectors off into a white-collar union, the Force Ouvrière (FO), headed by former resistance fighter Robert Bethereau and Socialist Léon Jouhaux. Dubinsky took the lead on sustaining a flow of money to the FO in $5,000, $10,000, and $15,000 donations, even as the FO denied the CGT’s accusations of American sponsorship.66

  One of Lovestone’s most successful endeavors in undermining the appeal of Communism to European workers was his publication of a detailed booklet, The Survey of Forced Labor and Measures for Its Abolition, which revealed the location of Soviet gulags where slave labor was enforced and reproduced survivors’ harrowing accounts. The publication, which was widely disseminated, did grave injury to the image of the Soviet Union as any kind of “workers’ paradise.” Lovestone published The Survey in no fewer than eleven languages and had its findings presented to the United Nations. The Soviets confiscated the work wherever it surfaced in Eastern Europe.67

  The broader significance of the struggle Meany, Dubinsky, and their representatives were waging was not lost on President Truman, who in 1947 was persuaded to establish the CIA to replace the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Soon after the newly formed agency entered the picture in Europe, it began utilizing the infrastructure Brown and Lovestone had put in place. Beginning in early 1949 CIA funds were funneled to FTUC and soon far outstripped all labor union donations; nonetheless it was the AFL operatives who had anticipated U.S. policy, and were the old hands at the game of checking Soviet influence in postwar Europe. At times, muses historian Ted Morgan, “it seemed that American foreign policy was an instrument of the AFL.”68 Indeed, Lovestone often bridled at the arrangement, dismissing the operatives the CIA dispatched to the field as “Fizz Kids,” bright products of Ivy League colleges who lacked both a feel for how labor unions functioned and an intimate understanding of working people.

  What made the CIA-AFL intrusion especially hypocritical was that the Lovestone-guided actions were in themselves examples of the dark influence of government on trade unions the American efforts were nominally designed to halt. And in their obsession with blunting Soviet manipulation, the AFL often wound up in bed with ultraconservative political actors of dubious character. “The c
hief weakness of American foreign policy is the predilection of our State Department for dealing with anybody who will promise to hate Communists,” Walter Reuther wrote in 1948.69 The unwanted backlash from this policy became manifest when the French federation CGT attempted to use strikes to disrupt the unloading of U.S. goods in Marseilles under the Marshall Plan. The five-year $17 billion U.S. aid program named for Secretary of State George C. Marshall aimed to revive the economies of Europe along the lines of free enterprise—a program the Soviet Union characterized as “a direct threat to the sovereignty of Europe.”70 To block CGT’s interference on the Marseilles docks, Irving Brown hired the notorious labor racketeer Pierre Ferri-Pisani and his Corsican followers, the Comité Méditerranée, to act as strikebreakers. They successfully counteracted the CGT’s strike efforts; however, rather than disband after its assignment was complete, the Comité Méditerranée hung around for years, terrorizing labor relations in the South of France and elsewhere and even ultimately shaking down Brown and the CIA.

  THE AFL’S INTERFERENCE in Europe in the 1950s had an early critic in a young CIA officer named Paul Sakwa, who began advising higher-ups in Washington of the harm Lovestone’s and Brown’s efforts were doing to the very labor unions they were propping up. “Elections were influenced if not purchased outright, union dues remained uncollected, organizing activities ceased,” Sakwa wrote. “What began as an effort to promote and defend democracy evolved into operations designed to thwart real, incipient, or imagined Communist threats at the expense of democracy itself.” As a U.S. labor attaché, Sakwa was once assigned to accompany George Meany and his wife to a dinner function in Brussels; Sakwa took the opportunity to share his concerns about Lovestone. When Mrs. Meany expressed interest in Sakwa’s words her husband lost his temper and ordered them both out of the car, then went on to the dinner alone.71